Lecture Transcript

The second thing I think is important, is the history of black women’s activism. And one of my favorite black women is Ida B. Wells.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett writes this pamphlet called Southern Horrors. She takes these white newspapers to task for inaccurately reporting on the lynchings of black men across the United States. Through Ida B. Wells-Barnett, we start to see the way that black women are starting to pull at the seams of both misogyny and white supremacy. And that really begins to lay the groundwork for Black Feminism.

It [Souther Horrors] reads like a bad-ass black woman blog post. If Ida B. Wells was tweeting right now, we would all be following her.